Evliya Çelebi: World Traveler and Companion to Mankind

Evliya Çelebi grew up in 17th century Istanbul as the "boon companion" of Sultan Murad IV. In his 20s, Evliya had a prophetic dream and spent decades traveling. During his travels he wrote the Seyahatname, one of history's important travel narratives.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm fair Dowdy and I'm to Bline and Chuck Reporting
and Delinea. I have a question for you, what's that.
Have you ever kept a travel journal? I mean, I
know you like to travel a lot. I have kept well,

(00:22):
I've attempted to, but I usually end up getting them.
I have a collection of beautiful journals that have bought
throughout the years, and I end up taking them and
I fill out a page. And then I realized there's
this big competition between actually wanting to do things and
having time to write about the things. While I'm on
vacation and I'm gonna get back, you get so busy
that you just don't have time to rerecord everything happens

(00:46):
to me too, if I'm lucky, I'll start writing on
the plane ride home and maybe fill in the briefest details.
So trying to imagine trying to keep a travel journal
for forty years now, and imagine that are expeditions included,
not just classic traveler high points, new meals, you eight monuments,

(01:06):
he saw people, you met, that kind of thing, but
events like wars and rebellions and pirate attacks. I mean,
imagine having time for that. I mean, I think I
would make time to write about a pirate attack. That
would that would warrant an entry for sure, So our
subject today. Eveliah Chellaby is a seventeenth century Ottoman gentleman,

(01:26):
and he's considered by many people to be one of
the world's greatest travelers and by extension, one of the
world's greatest travel writers. He kept a two thousand, four
hundred folio record of his journeys. He called it the
Saya Hotanomy or Book of Travels, and it's the longest
travel account in Islamic literature, maybe even the longest travel

(01:46):
account in the world. And from about age thirty until
his death in his seventies, Eveliah was on the move,
and for as long as he traveled, he kept on writing,
covering his journeys across rivers of ice in the far
northern reaches of the Ottoman Empire, to the Sahara Desert
and the Nile River in the south. And because Evliah
went to places that many others didn't even bother to

(02:07):
visit or at least document, his record has become a
key source for archaeologists, geographers, and cultural historians, and that's why,
in addition to discussing high points from Evliah's remarkable travels,
we're also going to talk about the strange history of
the Seahotana May, which, at nearly four hundred years old,
is only now becoming an item of world interest. But

(02:29):
before we get to that, there was the matter of
Evliah's homebound years. Of course, he didn't start traveling until
he was about thirty, So we mentioned Evliah was a gentleman,
and in fact, his name Chellaby means gentleman, so appropriately enough.
He grew up in the cultured atmosphere of the Ottoman court,
where his father was the Sultan's chief goldsmith, and his

(02:50):
mother was an Abcasian, possibly a slave girl given to
the goldsmith in marriage by the Fulton, who told him,
grand Aga, you're an old man in but God willing
from this maiden you will have an angel like world
adorning son. And sure enough Evil was born nine months
ten days after that in sixteen eleven in Istanbul, and

(03:13):
he started his education as other children of his class
would have, at the Madressa, which was Arabic school, where
he would have learned to recite the Koran, become a
prayer caller, and he would have also studied languages to Turkish, Persian,
Arabic plus Greek and Latin, and stories of Roman emperors
and Alexander the Great that he picked up from the

(03:35):
non Muslims who worked in his father's gold shop. And
when he wasn't studying, Eedliah still learned in a different way.
He roamed a standbull, watching artisans, exploring mosques, and occasionally
even attending court with his father. By his teens, Eliot
could recite the entire Koran from memory. This took him
about eight hours to do, and he'd do it every

(03:57):
single Thursday, and he said he was proud to have
made retained this tradition through his life. It was during
one of those recitations, in fact, that he got kind
of his big break in a sense. During a recital,
Evlo was summoned by the reigning Sultan Murad the Fourth,
who asked him how long his recitations took, and eight
hours must have seemed like a really good answer to him,

(04:19):
because the Sultan essentially then told him that they were
going to be friends. Okay, so what does being friends
with the Sultan really entailed. To me, it sounds a
bit like pursuing a higher education, because Evilo was soon
set up with a tutor, a calligraphy master, a spiritual advisor,
a music teacher for music and singing, a grammar instructor,

(04:41):
plus his old master for continued Koran studies, and so
his job essentially became to read and write, you know,
study during the day and night, refine his manners, dressed nicely,
and recite entertaining things for the Sultan, really showing off
his learning, and he he gives a sample of what
this usually involved in his book of Travels. He recounts

(05:04):
an early meeting where he asked the Sultan, look, I
will what exactly do you want to hear me recite?
You know, literature I can do Persian, Arabic, Turkish, Hebrew, Syriac, Greek,
maybe a medley of musical forms, maybe a selection of
different kinds of verse poetry. The Sultan actually even calls
them out on showing off so much, because in between

(05:25):
cataloging all this knowledge, this huge platter of things he
can recite for the Sultan, he throwing puns and make
witty remarks, some of them kind of risque and polished
the whole performance off by somersaulting out of the room.
I mean this kid, this kid knew how to put
on a show for sure. So his next two years
at court involved lots of study, beautiful books, calligraphy practice,

(05:50):
and those audiences with the Sultan and fancy presence as well.
A silver ink pot studded with jewels, wasn't one notable one?
And also a writing board and lay it with mother
of pearl good accessories for the scholar. Yeah, a gem
encrusted back scratcher, that's a bonus. So handy. But he
became especially valued when Murad the fourth was feeling down,

(06:11):
since he could crack him up with his near constant jokes.
Courtiers would hurry evliah In and Murad would say, quote, look,
the dispeller of woe has arrived. Sometimes his duties would
be a little more solemn, Koran recitations, leading calls to prayer,
singing sad songs, things like that. Others were more outrageous,
such as supervising the Sultan's wrestling matches and avoiding vomiting

(06:36):
on the Sultan when he'd pick him up and spin
him around, which sounds pretty nerve racking, not something you'd
want to do to the Sultans, So it seems like
with such a prestigious position, though minus the spinning. Of course,
Everley would really enjoy every moment spent in his hometown
of Istanbul and at the palace. But from about aged

(06:57):
twenty onward he was itching to get away. He wanted
to get outside of the city. He had only visited
towns just outside of the city wall, so to make
up for that, since he didn't have travel magazine studied,
he'd quiz dervishes about their travels and learn about the
seven Clients the four quarters of the Earth. Really just

(07:17):
make the travel bug he already had really even more
intense ready to go. In addition to his court connection,
Evlie ahead family pressure is keeping him at home though
as well. In an early book he wonders quote how
to get free of pressure from mother and father and
teacher and brother. I think that's probably a sentiment a
lot of people can relate to. It must have been

(07:37):
on his mind a lot, because when Evlie was in
his early twenties, he had a dream, but not just
a dream, It was a dream of vision, which appears
sometimes in podcasts they do they popped up recently, I
feel like now and again. But in this particular dream,
he found himself with early Islamic saints and the prophet Mohammed,
who asked Evlia to call the morning prayer. After he

(08:00):
was done, Eliah went back before the prophet to ask
for shaffat, or intercession, but messed up and asked instead
for a similar sounding word in Ottoman Turkish say a
hot or travel. So Mohammed promises him both, plus visits
to the tombs of saints and prophets, which do end
up coming along with his later travel. So according to

(08:23):
the Ottoman historian Caroline Finkel, this type of dream vision
is a common occurrence of literature from this time and
when that Eviliah himself used in later accounts of his travels.
But she also notes that in this case he founds
especially genuine, like it really was a life changing moment
for him, not that he woke up from his dream

(08:45):
and started packing, though it still took about ten years
before Elia could get away uh the first time, accompanied
by a friend visiting nearby Bertha, and on the trip
back home, he decided not to tell his folks but
to set out again and head off to the north
Anatolian coast um to to tour that rage in a

(09:06):
little bit. Since he was traveling with a newly appointed governor,
this also started a trend of journeying and the entourage
of various public officials, so he'd serve various functions along
the way, including things like prayer caller, tax collector, courier, envoy,
customs clerk, even a mom basically anything that allowed him
to tour with the retinue or run specific errands to

(09:27):
places that he was interested in. Imagine a more practical
version of his work for the sultan, and that's kind
of what it was. Yeah, and it afforded him not
only free travel of course, a job that goes along
with traveling, but a certain amount of protection to You've
got to imagine bandits in the woods and rebels and
pirates of course, as we've already mentioned, so traveling with

(09:50):
a group like this would have been a safer way
to go. So Elliott eventually began calling himself despite all
those other professions to lean and just rattled off world
traveler and boon companion to mankind, which I think summs
him up pretty well. Many of his journeys were in
the company of his mother's kinsman, the one time Grand

(10:10):
Vizier Melik Ahmed Pasha, and they traveled to modern Ukraine, Sophia, Iran, Iraq, Transylvania, Walachia,
and Maldavia, Poland Bosnia, just a lot of places all
over the place. And everlas range also starts to sound
more impressive when you consider he was usually taking the

(10:32):
hard away on these travels on horseback. After at one
shipwreck in the Black Sea um he was kind of
put off sea travel and completely all of his expeditions
were over land. When he finally hopped on a boat
about thirty years later, attempting to visit Cyprus, he was
quickly rewarded with that pirate attack that we mentioned before,

(10:52):
so it turned out that sea travel was just not
for him. Out of commission for all sea travel, and
after Melik Ahmed died in sixteen sixty two, Evilah no
longer had this major patron, this man who he was
mostly traveling with. But according to Caroline Finkel's article on
him in History Today, he also didn't have anything stopping

(11:13):
him anymore from going exactly where he pleased, so he
ended up going to work as a cavalryman and serving
in several major engagements before taking part in a really
notable peace mission to Vienna, which established a twenty year
truth between the Hotsburgs and the Ottomans. And everley Is
account of his trip to Vienna is really one of
the best love parts of the Book of Travels because

(11:35):
it's so full of both day to day beauties and
the horrors of the seventeenth century. Yeah. For example, he's
impressed by the organ at St. Stephen's and notes that
it quote fills the lungs with blood and the eyes
with tears. But he's also really taken by an operation
to remove a bullet from a man's head and the

(11:55):
doctrine that he himself receives to stabilize three teeth that
had been hit by a javelin. And he's kind of
scandalized by social customs he sees when he's in Vienna,
for instance, men and women socializing together in public, women
socializing without their husband's present. But at the same time,
even though this clearly disturbs him, he finds no problems

(12:16):
talking with and even befriending individual Europeans. So after this
epic trip to Vienna, Evliah moved up to Krimea, up
the Volga to Kazan, and then briefly back to Istanbul.
These trips back to Istanbul are really really short and
um come with large spans of travel in between. By

(12:38):
sixteen sixty eight he visited Greece. This is another really
famous part of the Book of Travels because he described
the Parthenon, which was then functioning as a mosque. And
the reason why this account is so particularly important and
why the detail is so valued is because just about
twenty years after Evlasa saw the Parthenon, the building was

(12:59):
of horse blown up when a cannon ignited an Ottoman munition. Stump.
I mean, sometimes it's easy to forget that the ruined
Parthenon didn't used to be quite as ruined as it
is today. In sixteen sixty nine he saw the Ottomans
take a Cretan fortress after a twenty one year siege,
and he had the honor of calling the first prayer there.
And then in sixteen seventy one, at about age sixty,

(13:22):
he embarked on his pilgrimage to Mecca, again dreaming of
blessings and this time from his father and his former teacher.
And it's interesting too he did. I mean, of course,
for a man who traveled so much and who was
so devout, it seems like he would have tried to
get to Mecca earlier in his life. He did try
to go, he had events waylay him. So this was
a real lifetime goal to finally be making it to Mecca.

(13:45):
And when he did it, he went with three companions,
eight servants, and fifteen Arabian horses, so every ended up
spending twice the time that a normal trip from Istan
Bowl to Mecca would take to After his pilgrimage, Everley
is settled Cairo, surveyed the city, and made a short
attempt to find the source of the Nile. But he
died around six four, likely in Cairo, though the exact

(14:08):
date and location are still unknown. Okay, so now that
we've covered in brief, of course Everly is forty years
of travel. What did he have to say about all
these places? What mid what he had to say? So
unique in the first place, And to a certain extent,
his work is fairly formulaic in towns or cities. He'll
write about topography, fortifications, monuments, you know, what you might

(14:31):
expect from a newcomer to a town. But he'll also
talk about dress and cuisine, occupations, class structure, medicine, naming, customs, speech, literature, hygiene, which,
by the way, he was really pretty into. He had
his slaves at one point clean out a public bath
house where the benefit of the people, he just thought
it was too growth. And then in the countryside he

(14:53):
sort of stuck to a formula to kind of the
in between parts of his travel. After all, and you
talk about the landscape, how long it took to get somewhere,
the direction he was headed in any high points like
saints tombs along the way. But and this is the
important part. With all the cataloging, usually comes an anecdote,

(15:14):
a conversation he has with a local authority or a legend.
In many cases, his is the only record of notable
people or strange customs in a given area because other
people just didn't write it down. And like any good
travel writers, some of the neatest examples of anecdotes have
to do with one of our favorite things food food writing.

(15:35):
So for instance, he broods over whether it's religiously acceptable
to eat horse meat with tatars and um questions that
a bit and another funny example, he assumes that it's
probably okay to eat giraffe meat with the people in Sudan.
He actually writes, God willing it is permitted. I have
not found a discussion of it in the sources. He

(15:57):
also claims to have found practicing cannibals among the Alms,
who are Western Mongols, who he says would eat their
dead to honor them. And perhaps most memorably, he talks
about a Cerkashian village custom of entering a dead body
in a wooden box in a hollow tree. So if
the bees made honey, that meant that the soul would
go to heaven. But unfortunately for Evliah, he experiences this

(16:20):
tradition firsthand after he accepts some rather hairy honey from
a local and ends up learning that it's honey from
a hive that was built on a dead man's crotch.
He has an appropriately freaking out kind of reaction to
learning this, But Eveleah Chelloby biographer Robert Dankoff also notes
that the further out on the frontier Evla gets, the

(16:43):
more remarkable his stories. And I mean, I don't know
if we should consider the cannibals and the honey ones
kind of in that end of the spectrum. But some
of the things that sound really shocking are of course true.
He talks about female circumcision, for instance, but others are
clearly made up and duds, fake trips to Western Europe,
ones with ridiculously short timelines, especially considering Evlia and what

(17:06):
we can already assume about how he preferred to travel,
which was leisurely um. And then also folk tales that
are obviously not true and they're presented as fact. And
I think this was interesting though, according to Dankov, wasn't
like Evly was trying to pull on over on his readers.
He suggests that the readers would have immediately recognized these

(17:27):
as fiction, just like modern readers would, and they were
really just included to entertain something that doesn't exactly fit.
I guess with our notions of travel writing today, you
don't want to just make things up. But I like
it too. Something about that appeals to me. Yeah, well,
I feel like nowadays people want to know, they really
want to know whether this is journalistic, is it true,

(17:50):
or is it something that it has to fall in
either camp. But the combination of the two does sound
so interesting. So, considering the important of the Book of
Travels as a geographic document, a cultural archive, and just
a bounty of really well told stories, you'd figure it
would be widely available. But that is not the case.

(18:12):
Though Everley is certainly considered an audience in his writing,
likely people who were well off, educated Ottomans like himself,
that's really not how it went down. After his death,
the manuscript stayed in private collections in Cairo until seventy two,
when it was given to the Chief Black Eunuch, who
was one of the highest officials at Ottoman court, and
he realized that it was pure gold and ordered up

(18:34):
more copies of it right away. Excerts of these copies
were eventually printed in Ottoman Turkish now, which is kind
of like Middle English for modern Turkish, apparently pretty impossible
to read for anybody but scholars exactly, and it was
translated into English as well. So the Book of Travels
became known for Book one, which surveys is standbull. But

(18:57):
the document as a whole was considered pretty much unimportant,
not worth translating the whole thing, so by the late
eighteen hundreds it was printed in its entirety, but at
that point, the Silton considered some parts too too risky
and had large sections censored, and that was really the
only thing that people had to work with for about

(19:17):
a century. Finally, in the mid nineteen nineties it was
transcribed in its entirety into modern Turkish. Still they're only
extracts available in English. I mean, when I first learned
about this guy, I immediately checked my library expecting to
be able to find a copy, and then I learned, like,
good luck. But another hold up with people, I guess

(19:39):
studying the whole manuscript, studying the whole piece of literature,
is it's really huge. In his biography of Evliah, Robert
Dankoff writes that quote, the gigantic scope of the work
has deterred investigators from analyzing its structure beyond a mere
enumeration of its basic contents. Characteristically, scholars have approached the
stay A hootonomy as though it were a huge mind

(20:01):
with numerous unconnected passageways. So what I take away from
this is that because it does have so many relevant
details to very specific areas of study, like botany or
food in um but I don't know the Ukraine or
something like that, people will go in and look for
what concerns their own work and not really consider the

(20:24):
whole work and the life behind it. But times are
changing and Evla is kind of on his way up.
He was named a UNESCO Man of the Year in
two thousand and eleven, and a trail through western Turkey
now follows the first stage of his sixteen seventy one pilgrimage.
And it's meant to encourage historic and natural preservation, promote

(20:44):
sustainable tourism, and also to advanced indigenous horse breeds. The
horse trail it's called the Evil at Chellaby Way. And
I think you listen to recording of a talk given
by Caroline think about this right. Yeah. It was a
talk given at the Royal Asiastic Society, and she said
that when she was scouting out this trail, you know,

(21:05):
trying to establish it with a group of other interested people,
they found that a lot of the local folks along
the way not only still knew who EVERLEA. Chelloby was,
but still knew what he had written about their villages,
you know, four hundred years earlier. It reminded me, I
don't know, maybe the best comparison we could make would
be Lewis and Clark or something, knowing about the region

(21:26):
they passed through if you still live in that region.
But this is four hundred years ago, which definitely puts
a puts a spin on the whole thing. Yeah, it's
pretty amazing. I have one final point too, I want
to make about travel writing in general. I was trying
to think about what makes good travel writing. We've already
established that we can't even keep you know, a week
of journals when we go on vacations. But I do

(21:48):
like reading travel writing, and I think that really strong
travel writing usually does have all of those details, but
has a strong enough presence behind it that somehow it
all feelsunified without feeling like, oh, I'm just reading about
what this person is thinking and going through. What appeals
to you about good travel writing, Well, it makes me

(22:08):
kind of think about what we were saying about Evliah.
I mean, what really appeals to me is when a
person becomes a part of a place. They're not just
observing and you know, telling you what they're seeing and
what they're tasting and whatever they're doing. They're talking to people,
and not just talking to people, but maybe becoming friends
with the people, um, you know, forming relationships with them
and really becoming immersed in the culture, because I think, um,

(22:32):
you know, that's what makes a really good trip. That's
what really makes me want to go on a trip
as knowing like, hey, I could become part of this
place and this is what it's really like. Well, and
that kind of writing is what's that's a good travel
narrative apart from just a guide book or something where
it's just telling you what you need to go see,
there's no personality behind it. And I think one of

(22:52):
the reasons why Evliah is such a strong travel writer
and while why he is so appealing after all these years,
is that even though he was very, you know, an
elite man. He was well off, well educated, he was
devoted to his empire, but he stayed pretty open minded
during his travels. I mean, he would include stereotypes, but

(23:14):
like I said earlier, he was willing to go meet
people and talk to people, and um, talk to the
average people too, and find out what they were doing.
He didn't let it stop him from from really experiencing
a place, and he knew how to describe things. He's
known for comparing things to vegetables, for instance, when everyone
can that's something everyone can relate to exactly even four

(23:37):
hundred years later. So let us know what you think
um makes a good travel travel writing or or any
travel favorite travel story. Yeah, that's a very good question
for you. I love to read good travel articles and
notorious for buying those um you know, year and anthology
travel writing cool. So let us know at history podcasts

(24:00):
at Discovery dot com, and I guess that's a good
time to go right to listener mel Okay, So today
we have an email from Kathleen, and she wrote in
to suggest that we cover genala Um and some French
resistance history, which I have always wanted to do at
some point, but I wanted to include one little story

(24:22):
she shared with us. She said, the reason I'm sending
this letter today is that I was prompted to write
you by an unusual incident on my drive to work
this morning. I was traveling down all of Avenue in Burbank, California,
when I noticed a strange phenomenon. Whenever I stopped for
a red light, my public radio station would fade out
into my surprise and delight, your podcast would fade in.

(24:44):
I recognized it immediately. It's the second in the H. H.
Holmes two parter, an episode I hadn't done without yet
and that I'd been anticipating. I thought at first you
must have reached a deal to be broadcast on public radio,
but later realized what must have happened an other missed
in history fan must have been driving the exact same
route at the exact same time, using an FM iPod

(25:07):
transmitter to listen through his or her car stereo. I
don't use an MP three player myself, so it couldn't
have been coming from me. To add to the unlikeliness
of this event, my public radio station couldn't have been
more than point one or point two away on the
FM number dial from the unassigned number this transmitter chose
to broadcast on, or I would never have picked up

(25:27):
its transmission. So there you have it. Burbank is so
saturated with listeners that it is possible for us to
be driving the same route at the same time, only
a car length and a fraction of a radio dial
number apart. So I thought this was pretty fun. And
also I'm so glad Kathwayne as a listener, because imagine
if you started hearing the H. H. Holmes podcast while

(25:50):
you were driving to work in the morning, it might
be creepy. Creepy would be afraid somebody was messing with me.
So thank you for sharing that story with as Kathleen.
And again, if you guys want to recommend any travel
writers your favorite out there, you can email us at
History Podcast at how stuff works dot com. We're also

(26:11):
on Twitter at Misston History, and we are on Facebook
and if you want to explore some of the topics
we talked about today a little bit further, we have
some great articles about travel on our website, including one
that's called can Travel Make You Happy? By our own
Amanda Arnold, and you can find it by visiting our
homepage www dot how stuff works dot com. Be sure

(26:36):
to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future.
Join how stuf Work staff as we explore the most
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